It looks as if Google's latest Puffin update is going to have more impact on designers than SEO workers this time.

Google said:

In a new departure, our algorithm will start to take design into consideration when ranking a page, in an effort to address usability and user experience (UX) issues.

There has long been concern over eyestrain among computer workers, and recent research has confirmed that the use of black or dark page backgrounds is contributing to this. Google will now give preference to sites with pale backgrounds. We recommend pale shades of pink, lilac or mint green as the most restful to the eye.

Google has found that sites using customized fonts have generally paid the most attention to readability issues and as such they will now see a boost in their rankings.

Sites using tables for layout will be actively penalised, as these sites generally employ other outdated techniques and deprecated tags which make them hard to use.

Also penalized will be sites employing videos, unless each is accompanied by a full transcript, readable by the Googlebot.

It looks as if Google's latest Puffin update is going to have more impact on designers than SEO workers this time.

> We recommend pale shades of pink, lilac or mint green as the most restful to the eye.

Any news on where pale grey (ie, like this) fits in? I'm assuming it will be better than white or really dark colours, even if it's not quite as great as those pastel shades, so we should still be OK with our SEO here on the forums. I'd be really disappointed if not, given how much effort we go to in order to optimise our pages and make sure we're always at the top of Google.

Any news on where pale grey (ie, like this) fits in? I'm assuming it will be better than white or really dark colours, even if it's not quite as great as those pastel shades, so we should still be OK with our SEO here on the forums.

Yep - as I understand it, any pale colour scheme will be acceptable, but the colours listed are considered the best. So technically, I suppose, if two sites are equal in all other respects, but one has a grey colour scheme and the other a pale rose pink, the pink will win out in the rankings.

guido2004:

Long overdue IMO. Loading time is fine and important, but what good is good info if you can't read it because of weird color schemes, or illegible fonts?

Exactly.

guido2004:

They should put a penalty on autoplay too!

That's an excellent point. Hopefully that will come in the next update.

I was delighted when I first heard this news. I've always hated dark sites, especially those with tiny white or grey text on a black background - and they seem to be so prevalent these days. My sites all have pale backgrounds, so I'm hoping for a boost in ranking. Most of them are blue, unfortunately, but I do have a couple of pale mauve and a light green, so it will be interesting to see if they fare noticeably better than the blue ones.

Personally, I am SICK AND TIRED of Google's constant changes in the way they do things.Please bring us back to "The Good Old Days" when you could simply put appropriate keywords in the meta-tags and be ranked in search based on that!

I wonder if, in the vein of recognizing better 'readability', this change will also provide benefit to those sites that use VERY LARGE buttons with lots of whitespace?They seem to be gaining popularity.

That's a good question. I think it might depend on whether the site uses button images, or real text. If it's simply an image, I don't think Google would be able to judge the text size, and hence the readability. But I'm sure I saw somewhere that font size would also be taken into account. Hopefully that means that they'll look at sites to see whether the base font size is set to 100%, to respect the visitors' preferences or not.

Edit: That's strange. The post above seems to have changed while I was replying to it.

Thanks for posting this, TechnoBear. Only one issue: Did you forget to tell us the date of the announcement?

Mike

Google quite often makes MAJOR announcements on this date. It appears to be an Anniversary of some type; or, perhaps, they simply like the mathematical symmetry of it.Depending upon what part of the world you live it is either:

But I would like to know if anyone has sites that have been hit by this puffin update, did you need to change table tags to get the site PR back?

Yes, I have a site that was badly hit. It went from the top page of Google to the 115th page.

But it was nothing to do with table tags. The problem was the colour scheme, which was essentiallly just black and white, with the links in blue. But now I've changed the background to mint green, with the main text in dark brown, and the headlines in gold. That seems to have been successful, because the site is now back on the first page.

That's pretty crazy that your site was affected so quickly. Yikes, they don't give you much time to get around to fixing it. I guess these are pretty old techniques anyways in terms of designing sites.

That's pretty crazy that your site was affected so quickly. Yikes, they don't give you much time to get around to fixing it. I guess these are pretty old techniques anyways in terms of designing sites.

Am I the only one thats like WTF? Its user and a personal preference to a color scheme you prefer. I personally like a dark background and dont have any problems with well designed sites that also use dark colors. We use a dark background on our site and I noticed a decline in impressions last week.

Does anyone have a LINK to the source of this?

I Googled the exact text but got 0 hits. Seems this forum post is the only indexed sourced of this info. Until a source is posted Im calling April Foolz..

Am I the only one thats like WTF? Its user and a personal preference to a color scheme you prefer. I personally like a dark background and dont have any problems with well designed sites that also use dark colors. We use a dark background on our site and I noticed a decline in impressions last week.

Does anyone have a LINK to the source of this?

I Googled the exact text but got 0 hits. Seems this forum post is the only indexed sourced of this info. Until a source is posted Im calling April Foolz..